Archive for September, 2009

I bought a G1 dev phone six month ago. Not because I seriously wanted to write applications for the android platform, but because it was the only way to get an Android based phone in Europe. Nevertheless, the complete Android platform is really appealing to me, mainly because it’s more open than an iPhone, there are much more nerdy apps for it and – yeah I know what you think – it’s based on Java.

Warning this is a potential boring blog entry. Apprx writting time was about 5min

I once tried writing applications for the iPhone and started to like the concept of Obj-C while still I hate the syntax and I don’t like the API that much. Android makes things simple for me, and I guess for most people knowing a little bit java. It implements big parts of the Java standard (although it doesn’t claim to be standard compatible) which makes it easy to start writing apps if you know the libraries a little bit. Android also includes the powerful HTTP libraries of the Apache project as well as Json and XML parsers.

Having said this, the most important factor why I started to love my phone and the Android system: I can easily deploy apps on my phone, I debug it on my phone, I have nearly the complete power of the java framework and I totaly enjoy seeing my first app starting on the actual phone after 1 hour of coding. The app itself is fairly simple. It’s a basic search interface phpMyFAQs upcoming Rest API.
So you can search an existing phpMyFAQ installation for a search term and display the result. Although the app needs phpMyFAQ 2.6.0-alpha it’s already available in the Android Market. So feel free to check it out. You can test it with the URL: http://faq.phpmyfaq.de/. The source can be found at http://github.com/thorsten/pmfMobileKit. Expect more updates to the app soon.